Women’s activist groups in Kenya have slapped their partners with a week-long sex ban in protest over the infighting plaguing the national unity government.

The Women’s Development Organisation coalition said they would also pay prostitutes to join their strike.

The campaigners are asking the wives of the Kenyan president and the prime minister to join in the embargo.

Patricia Nyaundi, executive director of the Federation of Women Lawyers (Fida), one of the organisations in the campaign, said they hoped the seven-day sex ban would force the squabbling rivals to make up.

She said the campaign would start from her bedroom and that emissaries had been sent to the two leaders’ wives, Ida Odinga and Lucy Kibaki, urging them to join in and lead from the front.

“Even commercial sex workers should join in the campaign which is so vital to the country,” Mrs Nyaundi told the BBC’s Focus on Africa programme.

“Great decisions are made during pillow talk, so we are asking the two ladies at that intimate moment to ask their husbands: ‘Darling can you do something for Kenya?'”

But the BBC’s Anne Waithera in Nairobi says the campaign is likely to meet stiff resistance from some men.